And Florence.
By now, Florence had moved in with her friend Betty Thomson and her family. When Eric arrived in Canada two weeks after sailing from Liverpool, he went directly to the Thomsons’ home. His excitement at seeing his fiancée again fell flat when he discovered that Flo was at the hospital finishing her shift. While waiting, Eric sat on the outer porch banister and kept polite chatter going with Mrs. Thomson and Betty. But his keen eye was focused down the road, looking for the young woman he hoped would round the corner at any moment.
When she did, midsentence and without apology, Eric hopped over the porch railing and sprinted down the road. Seeing him, Florence ran as well. They embraced, their faces buried in the curve of the other’s neck, and remained that way for a long time.
Betty watched with amusement, then said to her mother, “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen two people more in love.”
As before, the month Eric and Florence spent together went by too quickly. Soon enough—too soon—Eric boarded a train leading him away from Toronto, heading toward Vancouver. From Vancouver he would head back to China: to Tientsin and his students, to his friends . . . and to Flo’s family, who had become much like his own.
He could now count the days until Florence became his wife with renewed energy, feeling certain that the pure joy pulsing through his veins would get him through another year and a half until they could marry in China.
As wonderful as it was to be back—and as quickly as Eric managed to fill up his time—he had to reconcile the fact that none of his closest loved ones were nearby. The joys of spending time with Florence in Canada and his family and friends in Scotland were a memory met by a fresh loneliness. His colleague and friend A. P. Cullen, as well as the entire MacKenzie clan, soon left China for their furloughs, which meant that those who would have helped push away the hollowness until Florence’s return were now also absent.
The normally five-man-staffed college of British missionaries had dropped to three. Even after such a long stretch of time, a replacement for Professor Scarlett had yet to be found. Combined with Cullen’s absence, extra pressure fell on the remaining members Eric Liddell, Carl Longman, and Gerald Luxon.
In addition to Eric’s regular teaching duties, he took on Cullen’s previous role as secretary of the college, and, as the man who had developed the Min Yuan Sports Field, he was promptly named chairman of the games committee. Additionally, the newly ordained Rev. Liddell added regular preaching assignments at Union Church to his schedule. There he was consulted with anything regarding religious supervision and found himself still functioning as acting superintendent of the Sunday school.
As if all this were not enough to occupy his time, he began a column for the London Missionary Society Magazine. He wrote articles describing life in China, the Chinese people, and the relationship between those who served and those being served.
Eric loved teaching Sunday school and particularly lessons from Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. He had studied it so much that he put together a small booklet on the subject to aid the other teachers and students. Each Sunday in his class, Eric routinely dropped theological morsels to feast on, and many of these spiritually savory bits were extracted from the Gospel of Matthew—his favorite book.
Years later, Rev. T. T. Faichney, who pastored Union Church, recalled that Eric once defined the Kingdom of God in an extremely simple and satisfying way. “The Kingdom is where the king reigns,” Eric had said. “If he is reigning in my heart, then the Kingdom of Heaven has come to me.”[53]
Eric taught that it would be incorrect to think of the Kingdom as a fine pearl that a person should sell all he has to obtain. Instead, he instructed, we should see the merchant (Christ/the King) selling all he has (his life via crucifixion) to obtain the fine pearl (the hearer of the message). In this way, Eric stressed how the King reigns graciously over humanity.
Eric also designed an extracurricular daily Scripture reading card for his Chinese students, produced with the same overarching goal he set for himself—to designate daily quiet prayer time each morning and to seek the message the Bible had for them in their own lives.
Eric noted that the times and the culture continued to drift no matter where he was in the world or in which capacity he served. The trend had become evident in the culture of Eric’s British homeland and in his own Congregational Church theology. It had also frustratingly revealed itself in the behavior of his Chinese students—a particularly unruly class, which Eric wrote about in a ministry report:
The class has not been an easy one and it has driven me to a deeper life of prayer myself. There was one boy who was especially irritating so I put him down for special prayer. . . . This year he has been much better and for a time joined the Bible class, but there’s a long way to go with him yet.[54]
In the time that waxed and waned between hard work and waiting patiently for “Flossie” (as Eric now called Florence) to complete her nursing studies and return to China, Eric strived to go deeper into his relationship with Christ. He did his best to be mindful of others’ salvation as well and could not help but share the gospel with them when opportune. If those chances did not arrive, he frequently prayed for those in his immediate context. A unique chance presented itself in another way that stretched Eric even further, both physically and spiritually. Ku Lou Hsi Church, a Chinese congregation near Drum Tower in the old city section of Tientsin, had been without a pastor for a while. They created an opening for Eric that required him
